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"Ashes to Ashes" is a single by David Bowie, released in 1980. It made #1 in the
UK and was the first cut from the Scary Monsters album,
also a #1 hit. As well as its musical qualities, it is noted for
its innovative video, directed by Bowie
and David Mallet. The lyrics
revisit Bowie's Major Tom character from
"Space Oddity", which he referenced
once again in 1996 with "Hallo
Spaceboy". Bowie has said that with "Ashes to Ashes" he was,
"wrapping up the seventies really for myself, and that seemed a
good enough epitaph for it".

Music and lyrics

Melancholic and introspective, "Ashes to
Ashes" featured Bowie's reinterpretation of "a guy that's been in
such an early song", namely Major Tom from
his first hit in 1969, "Space Oddity".
Described as "containing more messages per second" than any single
released in 1980, the song also included plaintive reflections on
the singer's moral and artistic journey:

:I've never done good things

:I've never done bad things

:I never did anything out of the blue

Instead of a hippie astronaut who casually
slips the bonds of a crass and material world to journey beyond the
stars, the song describes Major Tom as a "junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an
all-time low". This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of
Bowie's 1977 album Low, which
charted his withdrawal inwards following his drug excesses in
America a short time before, another reversal of Major Tom's
original withdrawal 'outwards' or towards space.

The final lines, "My mother said, to get things done, you better
not mess with Major Tom", have been compared to the verse from a
nursery rhyme:

:My mother said

:That I never should

:Play with the gypsies in the wood

Bowie himself said in an interview with NME shortly after the single's release, "It really
is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's
about space men becoming junkies (laughs)."

Musically "Ashes to Ashes" was notable for its delicate synthetic
string sound, counterpointed by hard-edged funk
bass, and its complex vocal layering. Perhaps Bowie's most
sophisticated sonic work to date, its choir-like textures were
created by Chuck Hammer with four
multi-tracked guitar
synthesizers, each playing opposing chord inversions; this was
underpinned by Bowie's dead-pan, chanted background voices.

Video

Solarised colour in the music
video

The video clip for "Ashes to Ashes" was one of the most iconic of
the 1980s. Costing £250,000, it was at the time the most expensive
music video ever made. It incorporated scenes both in solarised colour (helped by an innovative
Quantel Paintbox technique) and in
stark black-and-white, featuring Bowie in the gaudy Pierrot costume that became the dominant visual
representation of his Scary Monsters phase. Also appearing
were Steve Strange and other members
of the London Blitz scene, including
Judith Franklin and Darla Jane Gilroy, forerunners of (later
participants in) the New Romantic
movement that was heavily influenced by Bowie's music and
image.

Bowie described the shot of himself and the Blitz Kids marching
towards the camera in front of a bulldozer as symbolising "oncoming
violence". Although it appears that two of the Blitz Kids bow at
intervals, they were actually trying to pull their gowns away from
the bulldozer in an effort to avoid them getting caught. Scenes of
the singer in a space suit - that suggested a hospital life-support
system - and others showing him locked in what appeared to be a
padded room, made reference to both Major Tom and to Bowie's new,
rueful interpretation of him. Contrary to received opinion, the elderly
woman lecturing Bowie at the end of the clip was not his real
mother, but Wyn Mac, the wife of comedian Jimmy Mac, who was
well-known to summer season audiences at the Floral Pavilion
Theatre, New Brighton, Merseyside.

Record Mirror readers voted
"Ashes to Ashes" and Bowie's next single, "Fashion", the best music videos
of 1980.

Release

"Ashes to Ashes" hit #4 in the UK Singles Chart in its first week
of release, rising to #1 a week later, making it Bowie's
fastest-selling single to that point in time. It was issued in
three different sleeves, the first 100,000 copies including one of
four sets of stamps, all featuring Bowie in the Pierrot outfit he
wore in the video. The B-side, "Move On", was a track lifted from
his previous album, Lodger
(1979).The US release had "It's No Game
(No. 1)" as the B-side, while the flip side of the German release
was "Alabama Song".
The single bubbled under at #101 in America.

Alternative versions

There have long been rumours of an extended unreleased version of
the song, allegedly some 13 minutes long and featuring additional
verses, a longer fade-out
and a synthesizer solo. A 12:55 version that appeared on the
bootleg From a Phoenix...The Ashes Shall Rise
was a fake, repeating the song's instrumental breaks to achieve its
additional length. Similarly, an 11:44 version on bootleg albums
such as Glamour, Vampires of the Human Flesh and
Monsters to Ashes was again nothing more the original
track with segments repeated and looped.

Live versions

A live
recording from a special performance at the BBC
Radio Theatre, London, on June 27,
2000 was released on the bonus disc that followed the first
releases of the Bowie at the
Beeb album.

Other releases

To promote the single in August 1980, a so-called medley of
"Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes", called "The Continuing Story
of Major Tom", was released on 12" in the US. However, this medley
was simply "Space Oddity" cross-fading into the 7" single edit of
"Ashes to Ashes". The promo's B-side was the full-length album
version of "Ashes to Ashes".

Cultural reference

For the 2008 sequel to their 2006 BBC TV series
Life on Mars, the
writing team of Matthew Graham and
Ashley Pharoah decided to transplant
the characters from 1973 to 1981, and chose the title Ashes to Ashes because they
thought of it as "that year's big Bowie track". They also borrowed
the famous Pierrot iconography from the
video of the Bowie single as part of the programme's visual design.
In the first season's finale, a car bomb goes off at the line "I'm
happy, hope you're happy, too"